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Kenneth Thompson ( 1943- ) is a computer scientist, notable for his influence on UNIX.

He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He received a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree, both in electrical engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, while at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the principal creators of the UNIX operating system. Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Dennis Ritchie's C programming language, currently one of the world's most commonly used programming languages. He also wrote the original standard Unix editor, edThe text editor ed was the original standard on the UNIX operating system. It was influenced by an earlier editor known as qed, and went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi. The non-interactive UNIX commands grep and sed were inspired by common s, which was descended from an earlier editor, qedQED is a line-oriented computer text editor. Originally written by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the SDS 940, probably in 1966. Ken Thompson later wrote a version for CTSS; this version was notable for introducing regular expressions. QED influe. Later, while still at Bell Labs, he and Rob PikeRob Pike was a member of the Unix team at Bell Labs. On his webpage, he describes himself as an amateur astronomer (he claims that a gamma-ray telescope he designed was nearly launched by the Space Shuttle), and an early developer of Unix and windowing sy were the principal creators of the Plan 9This page is about the operating system; for the science fiction film, see Plan 9 from Outer Space. Plan 9 is an operating system descended from Unix and developed by Bell Laboratories. It is not a Unix variant, however, but a separate operating system th operating system. During this work, he created the UTF-8UTF-8 (8- bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a lossless, variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. It uses groups of bytes to represent the Unicode standard for the alphabets of many of the world's languages. character encodingA character encoding is a code that pairs a set of natural language characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. Common examples include Morse code, which encodes letters of the Latin al for use on the Plan 9 operating system.

He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chessFor other meanings, see Chess (disambiguation). Chess (from the Persian word Shah is a board game for two players played on a square board divided into eight rows (or ranks and eight columns (or files creating 64 individual squares which alternate in colo endings, for all 4, 5, and currently 6-piece endings. Using these, a chess-playing computer program can play perfectly once a position stored in them is reached.

Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system". Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

Thompson retired from Bell Labs on December 1, 2000, and is currently a fellow at Entrisphere, Inc.